Kundra reiterates focus on cloud computing

Cloud computing is now squarely in the federal government’s hemisphere, according to White House tech official Vivek Kundra.

While speaking at the Brookings Institute today, Kundra, the federal chief information officer, said "we need to shift from a culture that focuses on generating paperwork to where we’re really moving towards continuous monitoring as far as securities concerned.”

Kundra repeated his belief that cloud computing technologies will eliminate the need for each agency to buy, maintain and replace their own servers. Instead, they can store their information on the servers owned by companies that specialize in hosting data and keeping it safe.

"We’re focusing on building data center after data center, procuring sever after server, and we need to fundamentally shift our stragety on how we focus on technology across the federal government," he said.

He added: "By building these platforms across the board, what we're also able to do is create an environment where we can engage with the American people and provide services that are lower cost, help us cut waste and actually move the government to focus on serving the American people rather than building yet another database."
Surveys done my Darrell M. West, Vice President and Director of Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, found that agencies generally saved between 25 and 50 percent in IT costs by moving to the cloud, based on case studies.

Kundra has already tasked the Treasury Department and the Department of Homeland Security to lead the ideas. The plan is to have each department determine the number of government data centers and to what capacity they are used. After that, each agency will create their own cloud computing strategy to make sure it will be included in their 2012 fiscal year budgets.

David Wyld, a Robert Maurin Professor of Management at the Southerwern Lousisana University, said hesitation to cloud computing comes from the fear of losing control and physical security.

Wyld described current sentiment as, “I have my servers. If I have my control over the data onsite, then that’s better and more secure than using an outside provider and the data being somewhere in the clouds.”
 
But Wyld also said agencies have to get over the notion that data is more secure on internal servers. The companies storing the data, such as Google, Microsoft or Amazon, have a big incentive to protect their customers' information.

"This is their business, this is their reputation on the line 24-7 to provide government with better, faster, and in many cases cheaper security [and] data access than what we can do internally," he said.